It was fully ten minutes before Esther appeared on the scene. She was limping and her nose was bloodied. “My God! Sis—thank God you’re not hurt. It’s Esther!”
“Esther?—skewk!”
“Danny, go to the linen room and get a large muslin sheet. I was just there.” When Deronda returned, he shielded his eyes and handed the sheet to Esther, who wrapped it around Sheila’s naked body. This was to the dismay of Tabby and Harris, who were sending out sensational images to an international audience.
While Sheila was slowly metamorphosing from avian to hominid, Esther frowned at Ohnstad, who was trembling head to toe. “Thor, what was it the regression therapist said at the altar: ‘But Mr. Ohnstad, this was your idea!’ What’s going on, Thor?”
I’d been wondering this myself. What was going on?
“Don’t know what he was talking about,” replied Ohnstad, looking sheepish.
“I think I know, Thor—do you recognize this?” Esther held out a piece of pale-green stationery with writing on one side and blood on the other, from her own prolific nose. I recognized Sheila’s calligraphy.
Before its contents could be perused, Ohnstad grabbed it and ran off through the portico.
“Thor, yer guilty of sumpin!” shouted Tarbox, who disengaged the net from Sheila and set off in pursuit. Esther and I stayed with Sheila. Figuring she wasn’t yet fully conscious and couldn’t object to my use of a cell phone, I put through a 911 call. I knew that none of the hundred million live viewers would wish to get involved. Paging an ambulance was up to me.
For the next few minutes we overheard Ohnstad yelping from various casements of Hyde Hall, followed by thuds and tremors. I guessed that he was running from room to room, his large and awkward frame hitting against armoires and doors as he eluded Tarbox’s Alien Constraint Net. The yelps diminished for a time, then suddenly resounded with greater force. We looked up to the iron railing off the third-story billiard room—and there was Ohnstad, perched to leap to his death. Apparently with a sense of occasion, he thought first to make some remarks to the assembly and the world. By now, CNN had a helicopter hovering to monitor the suicide.
“Before jumping, and I apologize for any mess—step aside down there!—I’d like to make a confession and explain what has driven me to this end. May I first apologize to the Farmers’ Museum for—”
Before he could continue his farewell and leap to eternity, Tarbox’s net overtook him and Ohnstad was dragged with little dignity into the billiard room. We could hear the pig farmer’s jubilation. “Bagged him!”
Ohnstad’s truncated farewell seemed enough to bring Sheila to her senses. Tying the sheet around her torso, she and the rest of us ran up to the billiard room where we found Tarbox holding the piece of stationery and standing with his foot on Ohnstad’s chest, like a gladiator awaiting thumbs up or down. Ohnstad wasn’t struggling; he looked resigned to a prolonged existence. But he did say, “Barry, could you please take your goddam foot off my chest? I’m not going anywhere.” Tarbox declined, I assumed waiting for Tabby and Harris to catch up and send forth his fifteen minutes to the world.
It was standing room only in the billiard room as Ohnstad, under the net, tried to resume his great confession. “As I was saying, I apologize to the Farmers’ Museum for—”
“Thor, before you say another word,” said Esther, “let me fetch something from the sewing room. Yes, you’ve got some explaining to do. Danny, lend me a hand.”
She limped off with Deronda, holding a kerchief to her bloody nose. Ohnstad sighed in anticipation of what they’d be lugging back. “Let them bring what they will. I’m owning up to everything.”
Onlookers gasped upon the return of Esther and Deronda, and parted down the middle like the Dead Sea in The Ten Commandments. The two slowly transported a long gray floppy object to the front of the billiard room. At arm’s length, Esther held up a large elongated smiling head while Deronda crouched behind, pushing two gigantic feet one in front of the other. The thing lumbered along like a huge shabby puppet. When they approached Ohnstad, Esther tilted the head so it would glare down at the fallen entrepreneur, who shrugged his shoulders and asked, “Anyone for a nice cup of tea?”
“I stumbled over this in the linen room running after Sheila,” said Esther. “Banged up my knee and nose. Almost blacked out.”
“Sorry about that, Esther,” said Ohnstad. “He must have fallen off the hook.”
She snatched the piece of stationery from Tarbox’s mitts. “And I found this in a pocket of that.” Sure enough I could see many pockets in the gray midsection of the distended puppet, as in a cargo vest.
Sheila recognized the stationery. “Esther, that’s mine. Give that to me! Give it back! Gimme!” She lunged at Esther, who dodged her.
“No, Sheila, this must be read aloud to everybody!” Before my weary eyes I witnessed the regression of two professional women to teenaged sisters engaged in a smear competition. At the benefit, Sheila had ratted on Esther, and Esther now turned tables. The fright for her sister’s life that she’d felt only minutes earlier gave way to gleeful taunting. But in fairness I must say that her main mission had less to do with Sheila than with Thor.
“Dear Thor, I take my pen in hand to tell you that it’s all over between us. I’m sorry, but it has to be—”
“Es, stop reading!” exclaimed Sheila.
“It has nothing to do with our lousy physical relationship—”
Ohnstad grimaced. “Just get it over with, Esther.”
Sheila again lunged at her sister—“Gimme that! Gimme that!”—who managed to give her the slip with help from bystanders and continued reading. “Rather, it’s what my psychic has revealed to me about your character and my fatal attraction to you. This last weekend, after she did a thorough palm reading and confirmed it with tea leaves and the entrails of a mouse, she told me that you and I have no future. For one thing, Thor, if I continue with you, I’ll be a male slug in my next incarnation. I’m a lover of nature, but I draw the line at male slugs—”
“She wouldn’t listen when I explained that slugs are hermaphrodites,” muttered Ohnstad. “This was all three years ago, folks.”
By this time Sheila, once again buck naked, had overtaken Esther and was pummeling at her, while her half-sister, crouched on the floor, doggedly held on to the letter and kept reading. “But it’s worse than this. My psychic has revealed to me that you are the spectral double of my father. She made me see that you may be no child abuser, you may be no furrier—but your bossy manner and nosiness make you a father figure, and that’s what my inner child needs least—”
“Inner child? Lord help us,” sighed Ohnstad.
“So goodbye, Thor. Please have your manservant bring over my clothes and overnight bag and the diaphragm. No hard feelings, okay? But my self-realization cries out for something more. No, don’t jump to conclusions, I’m not reusing that diaphragm. The psychic says self-realization will be found in celibacy. Also that you’ll have no trouble finding another woman and you should check out my half-sister, Esther. My psychic has discovered that you were Jewish in a former life. That should be enough for Esther—except for their being Jewish, she’s not very choosy about men. I’ve decided to have no men at all. That’s my path forever. All the best, your pal, Sheila.”
“Not very choosy?” cried Esther indignantly. She pulled her sister’s hair, to the chagrin of all enlightened feminists who happened to be watching daytime reality television. Tabby and Harris zoomed in, relieved that Sheila was naked once again. Brunette hair flew in this direction and auburn in that. Deronda and I at last separated them, I holding Sheila and he Esther around their waists. Deronda collapsed under the weight, and I took the moment to wrap Sheila up in the sheet once again.
They seemed to conclude their little sibling set-to, and they simmered down to being friends again, with just occasional pinches and tongue display, as everyone’s attention once again fixed on Ohnstad. He sat up and announced that, instead of
trying to get on with his confession, he would take questions.
Harris began. “You were apologizing just now to the Farmers’ Museum, Thor. Are we to assume this has something to do with the Cardiff Giant, Thor? And, as a follow-up question, Thor, is this the real giant or a fake?”
“I’m glad you asked that,” began Ohnstad. “Yeah, sure, this is the real giant—his gypsum has converted to muslin wrap form-fitted for aliens.”
Most could not help but detect some sarcasm, but Tarbox took these words as vindication. “Yah see, yah see, it was aliens all along! I told yah so.”
“Wait a minute, Barry. Just kidding. Have to tell you, I made the costume myself.”
Tarbox whimpered. Ohnstad managed to sit up and continue his saga from under the net.
“Late one night in April I crept into the Farmers’ Museum and applied the same stuff to the Cardiff Giant that John Browere applied to Thomas Jefferson. I poured liquid plaster over his head and feet, and told him to lie still. After thirty minutes I took off the molds and almost his ears. A perfect likeness. The rest of the costume I fashioned with methods borrowed from the Bread and Puppet Theater.”
“But Thor, where’s the real Cardiff Giant?” asked Tabby.
“That’s easy. Just where I found him, only six feet deeper.”
“Huh?”
“Yes, it confirms my view of human intelligence that nobody in all these months has thought to look under the open pit instead of somewhere outside it.”
“You mean you dug his grave?” I asked.
“Not exactly, Sherlock. I paid others to do it for me. You’re dealing with 2,995 pounds of petrified gypsum, right? I paid an additional sum to keep the gravediggers silent. Not about to name names, but I found three willing gravediggers from a neighboring agricultural county. They were vulnerable and depressed. Been out of work for many months because of regional depopulation—most of the local baby boomers are already dead and buried from eating lard and wieners.”
“But why? Why’d you do it?” asked Esther.
We were surely getting to the heart of the matter.
“That’s not so easy. Have you got a few minutes? This may take a detour into my early life.”
A hush spread through the billiard room as everyone cupped ears toward Ohnstad. More given to elliptical utterance, he shifted to an oratorical grand style I’d not heard from him before.
“Like Jack Thrasher here, I was born a Midwesterner, St. Paul, but blue collar. Parents were Lutheran underclass drudges. My father worked as janitor of the Masonic Lodge and chaffed at his lot. He got even by divulging the Masonic diaper ritual to outsiders and secretly soiling the diapers with gravy just minutes before Masonic funerals. My mother made the gravy. I’m not sure what else she did in life apart from the additional spawn of brothers and sisters with whom I had little truck. My peers at school made fun of me because everything was out of proportion—my knees didn’t go with my legs, my ears were too big for my nose, my teeth too large for my mouth, my face was too long for my head, and my words too long for my age.”
Esther butted in. “All of this is still true, Thor.”
“Feeling like a teenaged creature from the Black Lagoon, I sought refuge in philosophy and discovered the great Enlightenment figures—Voltaire, Diderot, Hume. The more I looked into my own religion, the more its god seemed to take pleasure in my pain. And no matter how many times I helped old ladies with grocery bags, I knew I’d end up in hell if this were God’s pleasure in the matter. I began to think God was little improvement over Vlad the Impaler.”
There was some squirming among onlookers at this heady excursion into theology. I thought to keep Ohnstad on track. “Sorry to interrupt, Thor, but you’ve got to hurry and tie this in with digging a grave for the Cardiff Giant. CNN will call off its reporters!”
“I’m getting there, Jack, hold on. Since there was no premium in the eyes of God on good works, and no girl would go out with me, I pondered life’s options, including suicide, and decided I might as well put money in my purse. Got into the Wharton School on scholarship and the rest is history. I made a fortune in junk bonds before the collapse and survived an SEC inquiry. This was my class revenge—I talked rich Ivy League grads into buying those bonds, ruining them. Then I set up as a country gentleman. Bought the Busch Mansion, went to the opera one evening, and by chance met Sheila Drake. This was my undoing.”
Sheila smiled and wriggled her head to and fro as if laying claim to unbridled power over men. Ohnstad stared at her resignedly from under the net.
“If you don’t mind, pet, I’ll speak of you in the third person.” He then addressed the larger company. “I prefer not to wax maudlin but must say that Sheila and I seemed to find a love beyond the ordinary, one neither of us had known. She had dated scores of pea-brained macho-narcissists from schools of the performing arts. She mistook their vacuous silences for a deeply felt and admirable reserve. To the extent I’d had relationships, I was loved only for my money—that is, not at all. Sheila was different. Or seemed to be.”
“I’ll admit, Thor, you were a cut above my other boyfriends. You could talk.”
“But Sheila’s passion for me coincided with her jumping off the deep end.”
“Deep end?” I asked.
“Yes, into every New Age racket that came along. At first I played along, going with her to a dowsers’ convention, for example. There I learned that dowsing doesn’t just mean finding well water. You can dowse a bottle of vitamin E—in fact you’ve got to dowse vitamin E and everything else you get at a discount drugstore. This was time-consuming but nowhere near the time it took to find natural, organic foodstuffs not contaminated by West Nile virus spray. We had to drive to an organic produce farm in Canajoharie County. Then she decided she had multiple chemical sensitivity and was nearly fired by the Glimmerglass when she refused to paint the sets. Happily, non-toxic turpentine in vast quantities saved the day. But then she fell in with pyramid worship and said we’d cease having sex until she could build a pyramidal canopy out of weighted flats from the opera. She thought it a bad omen when the canopy collapsed during rear entry. I was never treated to that posture again.”
Esther laughed, but Sheila didn’t look pleased with any of this.
Ohnstad’s interminable confession took a more interesting turn. “Now I must talk about human psychology—alas, my own.” He breathed deeply, as did I. “After the psychic of Butternuts County convinced Sheila to dump me and shun the company of men, I was unhinged. It was grief. Grief is a craving, and I craved her. I’d sneak backstage at the Glimmerglass disguised as a woman but was quickly outed by her colleagues. I’d drive to Cherry Valley and lay siege to her cottage but my BMW was a giveaway. I sent her organic yellow roses but they ended up on my own doorstep with ‘Return to Sender.’ Occasionally she’d consent to lunch at the Blue Mingo Grill, but it was as if I were dining with a long-lost second cousin thrice removed. We no longer had anything in common. And she wouldn’t let me speak—how shall I say it?—the discourse of the heart.”
“What’s dat, Thor?” asked Tarbox, tightening the net.
Ohnstad ignored him. “My grief and blunted passion then bore stranger fruit. How to explain this? Well, one consequence you can grasp easily enough. I swore vengeance on the paranormal—on every superstitious practice that could waylay honest human relationships or convince people they’re something they’re not or put aside all rules of evidence in favor of bogus miracles. These miracles suspend the natural order so that any rube working the nightshift at Kmart can feel he’s at the center of things. The universe changes its ways to make an impression on him, on him! The impoverished egos of alien abductees inflate to the orbit of Jupiter. It’s an identity thing. What an honor to be singled out by aliens!”
“This is all very eloquent, Thor, but what’s this have to do with the Cardiff Giant?” I asked.
“That should be obvious, sport. I wanted to make lots of people pay for their gullibility. They’d a
ll be taken in. There’d be a big commotion—hey, good for local business—and everybody would stick out necks with explanations. Aliens, Druids, the golem—what horseshit! Second time around, this Cardiff Giant hasn’t lost any of its power to bamboozle. I made some timely appearances to reinforce the hysteria—the Glimmerglass Opera, Sharon Springs, Gilbert Lake—sorry guys—but, as I correctly guessed, I could just sit back and ‘evidence’ of paranormal events would spread like wildfire. Sabotaging the Hall of Fame ceremony was lots of fun, gotta say. Then my plan was to confess the hoax—embarrassing an entire world of fools now that the giant’s disappearance has been reported in Beijing and Singapore. Maybe I’d even win some converts to the rational side of things. That at least was my agenda. Wishful thinking, you say? Okay, I confess I’ve been working more out of bile than indignation. So now I’ve done it, confessed the hoax. Oh, almost forgot the Holy Ravioli—made it myself—same principle as Browere’s life masks but I used pasta instead of plaster and modeled it on a dashboard Mel Gibson. Guess I’ll see if my master plot works from inside a jailhouse.”
“If yer lucky,” said Tarbox. “Yah might get lynched instead. Think I’ll just hand yah over ter the voters. We use ter have a gallows next ter the river.”
“Thanks, Barry. But please remember I treated you to kir and larger bribes over the years. So folks, it turns out I’m just as gullible, just as crazy as the next nut,” said Ohnstad. “I learned this the hard way. I thought if I couldn’t have Sheila up close, I’d have her at a distance. For three years behind the scenes, I tried to fix her up with other men, thinking I could spy on them at the local ice cream parlor. Maybe she’d be seducible, and I’d get a vicarious kick. Yes, there was also an element of revenge, on her and the psychic—maybe I could undo their celibacy pact. And yes, if she were to break the vow once, maybe I could move in again and she’d take me back. See, no singleness of motive—a convergence. So I sent widowers, composers, botanists, vegetarians, veterinarians, athletes, and even a journalist or two her way.” He looked at me ruefully. “These suckers would ask to see her on pretexts not having to do with dating or romance, and sometimes she consented. I’d feel a strange surge of desire and repulsion whenever I thought she might be yielding to overt advances. You call this sick? I agree.”
The Cardiff Giant Page 11